What’s new in Local and Mobile Search – London SMX – Day 2

Good afternoon, I was really looking forward to this session as it has some of the best people in local and mobile search around here are the best parts of the session.

Philippe Huysmans from Microsoft

For Bing local and mobile are very close due to the increase of the smartphone in the industry.

Three phases of local search:

1) The first date
2) Dating
3) Marriage

The first Date

Outside influencers play a large part in local search. 38% of people that have seen outdoor advertising will then conduct a mobile search. The same applies for TV. Bing integrates social information into the search results with their partnerships with Yahoo, Facebook, Twitter and Nokia.

Bing has an option to add a business through the Bing business portal. It’s a free of charge service that is due to be launched in Europe in the coming months.

Dating Phase

50% increase in consumers trust their social network for product recommendations. Bing tracks your location and tracks your search behaviour at home and at work. At home the user would search for “cold relief” whereas when he enters a commercial area he is far more likely to search for “Boots” in order to purchase a cold and flu remedy.

The immediacy of mobile is paramount as 70% of people conclude a transaction on a PC in 1 month, this is shortened to 1 hour in mobile. Bing is also crawling major specials sites and aggregating special offers that are near to you.

Marriage Phase

90% of smartphone users use mobile search, 46% of which use their smartphones to compare prices and reviews about the product they are just about to purchase. Bing vision allows you to take pictures of the product and has a highlighter tool , run a search on the product and shows reviews, locations to purchase and other information.

David Mihm – GetListed.org

Incorporate photos into your Google places page as its vitally important for conversion. Its also important for rankings.

Google insights allows you to drill down to location , use that to categorize your listings. If you try and get your bulk verification use the same email as your main url. Also each phone number is important.

Local SEO you’re trying to optimise a company’s location not their website. Name address and phone number crawled is far more important than any other factor.

Major citation sources are applicable to each country. Yelp is being used in most countries. Geographically relevant is more important in Europe and vertical relevancy is even more so. Use competitive intelligence to get insights on competition. Look for sentiment sources and photos and ensure you are in those platforms. Look for citations in chambers of commerce, local gov sites etc.

Blended search

Blended search is half dependant on the place page and the SEO signals.

Tips for blended results:

1) Create unique page for every location that’s indexable
2) Make sure your address is coded in HTML, hCard format is even better
3) Use City, state and other GEO indicators
4) Submit individual pages as that place page not your home page individual page doesn’t seem to affect rankings
5) Keep the site architecture as flat as possible
6) Submit a KML sitemap in Google WMC
7) Claim all your listings well beyond Google
8) Categorize yourself properly

Must reads:

www.davidhihm.com/blog/
http://blumenthals.com/blog/

Martijn Beijk – OnetoMarket

Tracking Google Places

Google places dashboard only covers basic data and is not that accurate. Use Google analytics campaign tracking to bring more places data into your Google analytics. The blended search results have made this more difficult to identify whether the map listing has been clicked on. Make sure that you are monitoring reviews in the actual results. In order to track local traffic now you will need to create segmented reports and track keyword phrases that
contain your list of locations.

Attribution

Multi-click attribution is available for 30 days in GA but you can custom GA scripts to create a unique identifiers and track longer periods.

Darrin Clement Maponics

On a mobile device search is more than a search box, it is often embedded. Your device sends your locations to the engines and therefore returns results in your area automatically.

Geofencing is going to expand more as people move away from check-in and checkout. Obviously it will be mainly opt in but will allow specials notifications to be sent as you enter or exit an area.

Types of Geofencing:

1) Static : special offer when you enter a district
2) Dynamic: open parking spaces
3) Peer to Peer : friends in the same area

Radial based Geofencing will allow people that are opting in to get sent a special if they enter the radial geofence with their mobile devices. Leaving a geofence may also trigger an action.

The downside is every retailer has to enter and manually configure their geofence. Predefined geofences allow businesses to enter the radius but they also need to be set up carefully.

About Louis Venter

Louis Venter is the founding director and CEO of MediaVision, a Search Engine Marketing (SEM) company specialising in all areas of search. His particular interests are organic search marketing, paid search marketing, conversion strategy and online PR.

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